Department of History, School of History, Religions & Philosophies

A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian: Justifications, Addenda and Corrigenda

A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian, edited by Jeremy Black, Andrew George, and Nicholas Postgate, with the assistance of Tina Breckwoldt, Graham Cunningham, Marie-Christine Ludwig, Clemens Reichel, Jonathan Blanchard Smith, Junko Taniguchi and Cornelia Wunsch, was published in Wiesbaden in 1999 by Harrassowitz Verlag, and reprinted the following year with minor corrections. This archive is intended to act as a supplement to the dictionary, fulfilling several functions as described below. It is up-dated periodically, about once a year. Proposals are welcomed for improvements and additional entries (address below). Where these are adopted, they will be appropriately attributed and dated.

In the preparation of the dictionary, the pressure of time made it impossible to take full account of all the material in the reviews of the two dictionaries and in the AfO listings, although a fair amount was incorporated from these sources. An attempt will be made here to remedy this, and also to revise any letters which have since appeared in CAD (from R onwards). Reviews of the CDA will also be taken into account. Eventually, the material on this website will hopefully feed into a second edition of the dictionary, so that the website functions as a rolling preview of the second edition.

This archive, originally hosted at www.trin.cam.ac.uk/cda_archive/, was created by J. N. Postgate, with the editorial assistance of Dr Simon J. Sherwin and technical advice from Dr Guy Deutscher and Dr Eleanor Robson. Grateful thanks are due to all who gave advice. The archive is currently maintained by Martin Worthington.

About the list of lemmata

Disclaimer

The list of lemmata is largely retrospective, attempting to assist the users of the CDA by supplying chapter and verse for its divergences from, or additions to, the two main dictionaries of Akkadian. However, it is not comprehensive, as there inevitably remain many smaller and larger points of difference for which documentation has not been provided. Sometimes this may be because a difference did not seem sufficiently significant to merit mention, but in other cases it was simply submerged in the ongoing editorial process. It will be possible to make further retrospective entries if they seem called for.

It is important to emphasise that this archive is specifically compiled for the purposes of A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian. It does not therefore seek to supply comprehensive references to new attestations of words or periods already recognized by the dictionary, nor to discussions of words or lexical points which (as is believed) have not led to a clear result suitable for incorporation in the next edition. As in the dictionary itself, words which are only known from unpublished texts, or single attestations (hapax legomena) on which there is an element of uncertainty, are not normally taken up.

Fonts

We use the Gentium/Ungkam font, created by Steve Tinney, which contains all the diacritics necessary for writing transliterated and normalised Akkadian. The font is available in both a Mac Suitcase version and a Win/Linux OpenType version, and may be downloaded for free at oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/user/fonts/. We strongly recommend to users of this webpage that they download and install a version of this font. Without it, certain characters (notably thet and tsade) may appear incorrectly.